0. Quiz

1. The social aspect of marriage is the focus of the McGowan piece.

·       [clip from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives]

Group discussion. Three options to discuss:

· Marriage is better than committed cohabitation.

· Committed cohabitation is better than marriage.

· For some people marriage is better; for some, committed cohabitation.

·       McGowan is comparing two possible situations: A committed cohabitation—of course they aren’t usually all that committed as we learn from the statistics that half of them last 1.3 years or less—and a marriage.  Which should one go for?  What is McGowan’s main reason for thinking marriage to be the better choice?

·       McGowan locates this reason in our weakness.  We seek permanence—she is not debating the difference between uncommitted cohabitation and marriage, but she is assuming that permanence is something one wants for the relationship.  But we are very weak.  “It is precisely because we are so likely to give it up that we must promise—at the outset, when everything is wonderful—that we are in it for life.”  Marriage goes beyond us—McGowan mentions children as an example—and the permanence of it also goes beyond our abilities.  We need help.

·       She then notes that the fragility of marriage is why the prevalence of divorce is a bad thing.  Married couples can be threatened by the divorces of their friends.  Note the hostility with which Judy takes the news about the divorce of Jack and Sally.  Judy feels obviously threatened by her friends divorcing.

·       By the end of the movie, we see this isn’t some irrational feeling.  For, Judy and Gabe divorce at the end of the movie, while Jack and Sally are back together.  Were Jack and Sally a bad example to Judy and Gabe?  Did their example contribute to their eventual break-up?  We are not told.

·       McGowan, though, has a more significant concern about divorce.  She says that widespread divorce “erodes the concept of the permanence of marriage.”  The word “marriage” starts to mean something else—a union until someone better comes around, say, or a union until one falls out of love, or a union until trouble comes.  None of these things are really marriage. And with this misuse of the word “marriage”, it becomes harder to actually marry for the couples that want the kind of commitment that marriage involves.  It is harder, because it involves making a commitment in one’s own wedding vows which is a more real commitment than that which other people make through their marriage vows.

·       McGowan’s friend Smita says that if you need marriage, your relationship wasn’t strong enough to start off with.  If it were strong enough, then you wouldn’t need the formal structure of marriage as a crutch.

o Discuss.

o Really?  The statistics on how long cohabitating couples stay together are bleak.  Admittedly, most of them may not make the sort of commitment Smita talks about.

o      Is it not possible that a relationship once was strong, and then on the winds of fortune became weak, due to sickness, money problems, etc.?  The initial feeling of infatuation is likely to eventually wear off. Certainly, even if it doesn’t actually wear off, it isn’t there 100% of the time. 

o Smita seems to believe that if you have a sufficiently good relationship at the start, you will continue in it for the rest of your life.  Is this so?

o      Compare the doctrine that a few Protestants in the U.S. have: “Once saved, always saved.”  The doctrine says that if you’ve once accepted Jesus, then you are guaranteed a place in heaven—you aren’t going to fall off the path of following Jesus.   If you do something really bad, say commit adultery, then that means you never really accepted Jesus in the first place. 

o Smita, likewise, is saying that if your relationship goes sour, then it was never really good to begin with.  But people do change, for the better and for the worse.  People have free will.  They can set themselves on one path—and then change.

o      Of course you can’t disprove Smita’s view in this way.  She will always be able to say: Well, something was lacking in the relationship at first.  But what reason will she have for saying that?

2. Common sense says that practice makes one better. By cohabitating with someone prior to marrying one should be able to get better at marriage. Moreover, the cohabitation is a kind of trial marriage, and so should help to weed out couples who are “incompatible”, thus ensuring that those that progress to marriage will be more successful. This is all extremely plausible.

• But no matter how plausible it is, it is false. Some things that common-sense says are in fact false.
• In fact, there is a correlation between prior cohabitation and marital failure, whether measured via divorce or via lack of the right kinds of marital interactions. This “Cohabitation Correlation”, as we might call it, apparently came as a surprise to social scientists, given how counterintuitive it was.
• The correlation was discovered by Booth and Johnson in their 1988 paper. It has since been confirmed by a number of studies. A particularly vivid illustration of this is that over the three years of the Booth and Johnson study, 5% of those who had not cohabited and 9% of those who had divorced.
• The big question is whether this correlation is causal, i.e., whether cohabitation makes one less good at marriage. If it is causal, then it may well give one good reason not to cohabit. However, if it is not causal, it does not.
• For instance, there is, I suspect, a correlation between eating pork and not getting Tay Sachs disease (a degenerative CNS disorder). One could imagine a newspaper editor after finding out about this correlation putting in the headline: “Pork protects from disease.” But this is mistaken. The reason for the correlation is simply this: for genetic reasons, people of Jewish ancestry have a 100 times greater chance of getting Tay Sachs disease than members of the general population, and for religious reasons, people of Jewish ancestry are less likely to eat pork. But refraining from pork will not make a non-Jew more likely to get Tay Sachs and eating pork will not make a Jew less likely to get Tay Sachs.
• There are three main hypotheses for explaining the correlation:
• Cohabiters have in effect started their marriage earlier, and so early in their formal marriage, they are simply at a more vulnerable point in their relationship, because they have already passed their initial “high”.
• However, Booth and Johnson found that “the relation between cohabitation and marital quality is a permanent feature of the relationship.”
• Causation: cohabiting makes one less good at marrying.
• Selection effect: In the case of the pork eating and not getting Tay Sachs correlation, the correlation is explained by a third variable—not being of Jewish ancestry. In the marriage and cohabitation case, we can then look at additional variables that would simultaneously cause a deterioration in marital quality and a greater likelihood to cohabitate. Another way to express this is to say that what we have is a selection effect: cohabitation selects for those who are less good as marriage prospects.
• To argue for the selection effect, we would need to come up with variables that could account for both poor marriage quality and likelihood to cohabitate. There are a number of examples of such variables: not being very religious, being a drug user, being less responsible financially, etc. Common sense (which we know is unreliable) says that these variables are all signs of being a less traditionally conventional person and a less conventional person is more likely to cohabitate and less likely to be committed to the absolute permanence of marriage.
• Booth and Johnson identified a number of such variables and found that they indeed do make one both more likely to cohabitate and to be less good at marriage (“less good” is appropriate, because both marital duration and marital duration were measured).
• However, these variables do not in fact account for all of the correlation. Even keeping all of these variables constant, there is a correlation between cohabitation and being less good at marriage. A puzzle remains.
• One might simply hope that additional variables will account for the correlation. But the question is whether there is any scientific reason for such a hope, or whether it is simply based on a prejudice against the causal theory.